The Bookseller

· This has been a good year for book buyers; not such a clever one for publishers and booksellers. The industry should have enjoyed a strong market that, even without Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, would have shown an improvement on 2002 trading. But publishers felt the squeeze from increasingly tense discount negotiations, and from dealing with the heavy numbers of books that booksellers returned to them unsold. ("Gone today, here tomorrow," as New York publisher Alfred A Knopf described the process.)

Booksellers now offer year-round three-for-two offers, and give away hefty price cuts on lead titles in order to compete with the supermarkets and with Amazon.co.uk. These pressures have contributed to very good deals for consumers: if you are prepared to shop around, you very rarely have to pay full price on any new title. We'll never know if booksellers would have sold 3m copies - the current total - of Harry Potter 5 at the full price of £16.99. But charging that price, rather than up to 50% less, would have earned them an extra £20m.

· There appears to be a laudable tilting of the market in favour of buyers - a phenomenon that those who praised the scrapping in 1995 of the Net Book Agreement, by which publishers fixed the prices of books, predicted. But it is hard to describe a market so heavily influenced by the supermarkets and by the battles of chain retailers as one in which consumers hold sway.

Authors too are, with obvious exceptions, feeling the pinch. Some large publishers say that their payments to authors have increased. Nevertheless, this is not a view shared by literary agents, who have seen their clients' incomes eaten into as a result of the large discounts publishers give to retailers - every deal at 50% or higher triggers a reduction in royalty. The Bookseller this week publishes an article, written shortly before his untimely death last month, by the literary agent Giles Gordon, who argues that the current payments system has become absurdly complicated and unfair, and that deals should stipulate set sums to authors for each copy of a book sold.

· Some highlights of 2003: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, of course; 1.7m copies sold in a single day. Bestsellers, Life of Pi and Eats, Shoots & Leaves, from independent houses Canongate and Profile; and Booker-shortlisted novels from two others, Atlantic (The Good Doctor) and Tindal Street (Astonishing Splashes of Colour). The Big Read - not, in presentation, the BBC's most distinguished offering, but it spawned a good many reading groups, and sold a lot of books. Ottakar's bought Hammicks, merging two medium-sized bookselling chains - not the last merger the book retail sector will see. The creation of a booksellers' and publishers' forum to discuss industry issues. More big advances for children's books. Madonna's first two children's books and David Beckham's book - not his first, but the hype may have led you to assume otherwise.

· After suggesting, incorrectly, that because Andrew Taylor had signed a deal with Michael Joseph he was leaving HarperCollins, I went on to assert (December 13) that another Michael Joseph acquisition, Gordon Ramsay, was leaving Quadrille. It was a shame, I implied, that the smaller publisher was losing its star author as soon as a big project came along. So I am very happy to report that Quadrille has signed up the chef in a new three-book deal, with the first book due next autumn.

The micro chartHardback biography

1 My Side by David Beckham (CollinsWillow £18.99)2 A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell (Michael Joseph £17.99)3 Rags to Richie by Shane Richie (Contender Bks £17.99)4 Bravemouth by Pamela Stephenson (Headline £18.99)5 Ricky by Ricky Tomlinson (Time Warner £17.99)6 Greavsie by Jimmy Greaves (Time Warner £18.99)7 Whatever You Say I Am by Antony Bozza (Bantam Press £17.99)8 What's It All About? by Cilla Black (Ebury Press £17.99)9 Scoring at Half Time by George Best (Ebury Press £17.99)10 My Story: The Official Book by O'Donnell/Rowley (Virgin £18.99)